


;why are you barefoot?

by failwolfhale



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Pre-Slash, derek is only mostly grumpy, kate didn't mess up derek, laura didn't die, peter is only kind of crazy, she was just crazy and killed his family, so he doesn't have all that guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-17
Updated: 2014-10-17
Packaged: 2018-02-21 12:54:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2468909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/failwolfhale/pseuds/failwolfhale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>Derek is twelve years old and he’s outside with Laura when the scent catches them. They don’t even bother putting their shoes back on before running from the river where they’d been hunting for mudbugs. Derek clings to his sister’s hand, two weeks from being eighteen and as tough as they come. Twigs and rocks and thorns and roots tear into their feet as they run but the cuts heal as quickly as they acquire new ones and it doesn’t matter. </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>  <em>By the time they get there, Peter is laying on the ground outside the house, unconscious with little Cora in his arms, protecting her from the flames that were licking up the wood of the house. Derek runs for it but Laura holds him back tightly, clinging to him, her blue eyes wide and frightened. Derek can hear their family inside and he wonders why Laura’s not trying to do something.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>  <em>That’s when a loud roar goes up, Laura collapses, and when she opens her eyes again they’re crimson red and Derek knows their family is lost to them.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	;why are you barefoot?

**Author's Note:**

> Mudbugs are what we in the south call crawfish or crayfish or crawdads or whatever you folks call 'em. 
> 
> This was inspired by a gorgeous piece of fanart by [Ginruru](http://ginruru.tumblr.com) that you can find [right here](http://ginruru.tumblr.com/post/98421476581/why-are-you-barefoot-w-what-your-feet) on her beautiful blog.

Derek is twelve years old and he’s outside with Laura when the scent catches them. They don’t even bother putting their shoes back on before running from the river where they’d been hunting for mudbugs. Derek clings to his sister’s hand, two weeks from being eighteen and as tough as they come. Twigs and rocks and thorns and roots tear into their feet as they run but the cuts heal as quickly as they acquire new ones and it doesn’t matter. 

By the time they get there, Peter is laying on the ground outside the house, unconscious with little Cora in his arms, protecting her from the flames that were licking up the wood of the house. Derek runs for it but Laura holds him back tightly, clinging to him, her blue eyes wide and frightened. Derek can hear their family inside and he wonders why Laura’s not trying to do something.

That’s when a loud roar goes up, Laura collapses, and when she opens her eyes again they’re crimson red and Derek knows their family is lost to them. 

The ambulances come and they take Peter, take Cora. Laura climbs into the back of the ambulance with Peter so Derek scrambles in after Cora, nine years old but small and light and built like a bird. Derek wonders how Peter got her out, why Cora and not someone else. But he’s grateful. He grabs her hand tight and she looks up at him from over the oxygen mask on her face, brown eyes teary and sad and scared and confused. Derek brushes her hair back and kisses her forehead, quiet until they get to the hospital. 

Everything is bright and loud and Cora gets whisked away behind double doors he can’t go through. A nurse brings him a glass of water but he turns away and goes to curl up into an uncomfortable wooden chair with plastic upholstering. It’s supposed to offer some comfort, he thinks, the upholstery, but it’s plastic so it can be cleaned easily and plastic is never comfortable. Derek doesn’t notice the way the wooden arm rests dig into his thighs though, can only focus on Laura’s steely voice two hallways down as she talks with a stubborn nurse. 

There’s a sniffle to his left and Derek looks over, sees a little boy about Cora’s age with short but somehow still messy brown hair, his skin pale and dotted with dark moles. There are tear tracks on his round cheeks and he’s pulling at his jacket, scrubbing his eyes, never sitting still. 

Derek looks away, ignores him, focuses on Laura again until there’s the sound of the boy shifting. 

“Why are you barefoot?” the little boy asks in a whispery soft voice but Derek can hear him perfectly. He smells like iodoform and desperation and heart break. It makes Derek want to howl. 

“What?” Derek croaks out, voice rough from disuse. He realises he hasn’t spoken a word since he and Laura were still at the river.

“Y-your feet. You aren’t wearing shoes,” the boy points out, one small finger directing towards Derek’s dirty, bare feet. 

Derek looks down and is surprised to find that he is indeed still barefoot. His shoes are probably still by the river, still waiting for him to return to them and traipse home with a bucket of mudbugs for the gumbo his mama was going to make. 

Derek doesn’t have a home anymore. Or his mama. He sniffles to himself and he tries not to cry. 

“I didn’t have time to put them on before I had to run,” Derek says quietly, wiping the back of his hand over his watery eyes and swallowing thickly. 

“Oh,” the boy replies and doesn’t ask and he’s quiet for a long moment. Derek watches him fiddle with his shirt sleeves, with the hem of his red jacket, with the laces on his blue converse shoes. “I wish I could have run too.” He says it so quietly that Derek almost doesn’t hear it, wouldn’t have heard it if he hadn’t been paying attention already. 

“Where would you run?” Derek asks, grasping at straws to distract himself from the crippling grief of losing his family. Eleven pack members, eleven connections he no longer feels, eleven lives lost, four humans among them. 

“To my mom,” the boy answers and Derek can hear the stutter in his heart beat before it speeds up, the way the boy’s voice shakes and fresh tears run down his cheeks. “She’s gone now. M-my dad wasn’t here.” 

Derek’s breath hitches too and he crawls over the armrest so that he’s sitting in the chair next to the boy. “My mom is gone too,” he whispers back and the boy looks up, his eyes the same color as the whiskey that Derek’s father liked to drink when Uncle David was being stubborn. Derek decides not to tell him that the rest of his family is gone too. 

The boy sniffles quietly and seems to hesitate before his hand flies out and grips Derek’s in a surprisingly strong hold. Derek doesn’t quite know what to do but he ends up curling his fingers around the hand in his own. The boy calms down after that and eventually falls asleep. Derek sits there for a long time until Laura comes back. 

Her short black hair is messy and tangled, blue eyes rimmed in red. Derek gets up and lets go of the boy’s hand carefully. Laura doesn’t seem to notice, just wraps him up into a tight hug, whispers that they have to run now. 

They stay in Beacon Hills only until Laura turns eighteen. She’s struggling with the Alpha and Peter is still comatose and she doesn’t know what else to do for him. She fights tooth and nail until she’s granted guardianship of Derek and Cora and then they put Beacon Hills in their rearview mirror and they don’t look back. 

It’s years later when they finally return home. Peter’s brain is showing activity, the nurse says when the call comes, and Laura wants to see him, wants to settle things, help however she can. Derek is twenty years old, Cora is seventeen, and Laura is twenty six. They pack up their small apartment into Laura’s Camaro and Derek’s old Chevy truck and they drive back across the country. Cora takes turns switching between the cars and singing bad pop music that Derek only pretends to hate. 

Laura goes to the hospital first thing when they get back to town and she takes Cora with her, drops her at the cemetery on the way to put flowers on their family’s graves. 

Derek can’t go to either of those places so he goes back to what’s left of their home. It’s a burnt out husk now and he can smell the ash and dirt and wild animals. He also smells life. He can smell the fresh grass starting to pop up, the vines and bushes and plants using the nutrient rich soil around his childhood home to feed themselves, to grow and bloom. It fills Derek’s chest with hope and he doesn’t realize that something around smells off, out of place. 

He follows the route to the river he and Laura had been at when the house went up in flames and he sits down on the flat rock by the river bed, takes off his boots and lets his toes skim the clear water. He can see a mudbug down in the water and thinks about plucking it out but doesn’t, instead watches it crawl around on the rocks in the clear water and then disappear. 

Laura and Cora find him there later. Laura wraps her arms around him and Cora and they cry for the first time in a long time. That night they run in the woods and Derek doesn’t notice that Laura is holding back, isn’t telling them something. 

He finds out what a week later when he’s at the river again and he hears two heart beats but they’re unfamiliar. Not his sisters’. He gets up and he puts his shoes back on, trails the heartbeats to two teenage boys trespassing on his property. 

One is a wolf. 

The full moon comes the next night and Laura has to take down the newly bitten wolf before he accidentally kills a girl. The Argent girl who is surprisingly oblivious to it all. The boy - Scott, they learn - is indignant and angry. He yells, accuses Laura of biting him but she shakes her head grimly, looks to Derek and Cora who are watching with grim faces and then she explains. 

She explains to Scott about their family, how they were killed by a hunter looking to impress her equally sadistic father. Then she tells them all that Peter had been getting steadily stronger in the last few months. His nurse had helped him cover it up so as not to raise suspicion. He promised to turn her once his strength was back. It had been a freak accident that there was a lone Alpha in town on the night of the full moon. Peter killed the girl on accident, Laura thinks, and took her power, used it to heal himself but he couldn’t control it. It was Peter who turned Scott in the woods and something needed to be done. He couldn’t handle it.

_He’s not the man he used to be,_ Laura tells them grimly and Cora walks out because she and Peter had always been close and he had saved her from the fire.

Laura implores Scott to join them, promises to help. Scott grumbles about not needing a pack, not wanting to be a werewolf in the first place. Laura stops Derek from pointing out that he can’t just ignore it and make it go away. Scott keeps his distance but Derek keeps tabs on him per Laura’s instructions. _Just in case,_ she tells him. 

Scott has impulse control issues, can’t handle his anger, can’t keep a hold on the shift. He almost turns on the lacrosse field and Derek is ready to intervene but before he can, Scott’s friend is running him off the field and when Derek finds them again, Scott is human and his friend is rubbing his back. 

Derek wonders why the friend seems familiar but he doesn’t say anything, sneaks away quietly after making sure Scott won’t shift again. 

The week after his second full moon, Scott shows up to their new loft with his friend in tow. When asked how he found them, Scott’s friend looks smug about it. “I taught him how to track scents,” he says and Laura looks impressed. 

“Scotty here is willing to join your pack,” the friend says - Stiles, they find out later - “but we’re a package deal. Two for one. Take it or leave it.” 

Laura raises her brows, tucks hair behind her ear and looks to Cora and Derek. Derek scowls and Cora shrugs delicate shoulders. “Fine, but you get to help with your friend’s training,” she tells Stiles. Laura probably thinks it’s a punishment but Stiles looks delighted and he never once complains when Scott bruises him a bit during drills. 

Stiles isn’t his real name but he refuses to divulge the information. His face goes stony and hard and Scott gravitates towards him, rubs his back and lets Stiles lean against him. The three Hales share a look and none of them bring it up again. 

What they do find out is that Stiles is incredibly smart and sharp witted. He makes connections no one else does and he seems to know exactly how to translate things to Scott when Scott doesn’t understand what Laura is trying to explain. He always uses a lot of movie and pop culture references that Derek doesn’t understand but Scott always seems to get it after that. 

Scott gains control of his wolf surprisingly easily and none of the Hales say anything about Allison Argent’s scent being all over him pretty constantly. Stiles seems to get it though and he shares several looks with Derek whenever Scott is distracted with giving his phone heart eyes when he’s texting her.

Sometimes Stiles stares at Derek with these ridiculous brown eyes and Derek thinks that Stiles knows something he doesn’t, thinks that Stiles is secretly planning something or assessing...something Derek isn’t yet sure of. Derek isn’t sure how it makes him feel so he scowls back every time and leaves. If he likes the way Stiles’ huff of laughter sounds every time he does it, well, that’s his business. 

Peter loses control and he breaks out of the hospital. They find out that Allison had no idea about werewolves until Peter showed up at the Argent home and tried to kill her. Chris Argent shot a round into Peter’s shoulder and Peter ran off before Chris could hit him again.

They catch up to him before the Argents, Derek and Cora and Scott hold Peter down while Stiles stands nearby with mountain ash just in case. Laura digs her claws into Peter’s neck and Peter howls, eyes fading from crimson red to ice blue and then he slumps into the dirt.

Derek doesn’t think about how he looks exactly like he did that afternoon when Derek and Laura found him unconscious on the ground outside the house with Cora curled against his chest and the house burning behind him. 

Laura takes him to Deaton, who used to be their mother’s emissary though Derek had had no idea. Neither, it would seem, did Scott who worked at Deaton’s animal clinic, because his eyes nearly fell out of his skull when he found out Deaton knew the whole time Scott was trying to keep the secret. 

Peter is put onto a special floor at Eichen house into a room with lined mountain ash barriers to keep him in. 

Laura meets Chris Argent on neutral ground and apologizes formally for their uncle. They form a sort of treaty that Derek hears about after it’s done. 

Apparently Chris had been out of the hunting game since his wife had committed suicide after being bitten by an alpha in Arizona. He lost faith in their cause when his daughter had to lose her mother and since he found out it was his sister who had slaughtered Derek’s entire family in cold blood - (Kate is on death row after being found guilty of killing another family in Pennsylvania and Chris isn’t all that upset about it.) 

Scott is allowed to date Allison on the condition that he have a family dinner with Chris and Allison every other week and the understanding that if Allison were to get pregnant, Chris’ wolfsbane bullets would find home in Scott’s body. 

Laura meets a deputy at the police department named Jordan who has an easy smile and treats her right and makes her smell content instead of tired. 

Cora takes an online class to get her GED, starts talking about Junior College and then transferring. She talks about studying wildlife biology and starting a preserve on their old land when she’s old enough. 

And Derek finds himself sitting on that flat rock by the river more and more, wondering what would have happened if he and Laura had gotten to the house sooner, if they hadn’t left at all. He doesn’t know what else to do with his life at this point, is content just to be alive. 

He’s sitting there another afternoon in late May. School has let out and the weather has been mercilessly hot with no end in sight. There haven’t been clouds for days, the air is arid from lack of rain and makes Derek’s skin dry, cracking over his knuckles. Derek contemplates jumping into the river even though he’s fully clothed. 

A familiar heartbeat reaches his ears and he doesn’t look up when another body sits down next to him. 

Stiles hangs his legs over the side of the rock and lets just the rubber soles of his converse skim the water. 

“Why are you barefoot?” Stiles asks after a long few minutes of nothing but the rush of the river and the lethargic song birds chirping in the trees. 

“What?” Derek responds, something in his memory jogging as he looks over to Stiles. 

Stiles smirks and he points at Derek’s feet. “Your feet,” he says, “you aren’t wearing any shoes.” 

And then it clicks and Derek stares and Stiles’ features go soft. They’re both quiet and then Derek says, “I didn’t want to get them wet in the river.” 

Stiles nods and he smiles too, reaching down to pull off one shoe at a time and then one sock, left foot then right foot. “That’s a good point. I don’t want mine to get wet either,” he says like he just decided this and Derek nods again, looks back at the water. 

Neither of them say anything and just like so many years ago, Stiles reaches out and he takes Derek’s hand in his. Derek doesn’t hesitate this time when he wraps his fingers around Stiles’, holds on tightly to him and finally relaxes.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this story, please feel free to comment or leave your love or pop on over to my [tumblr](http://failwolfhale.tumblr.com) and [reblog](http://failwolfhale.tumblr.com/post/100028358551/) it and maybe even follow me because I'm nice.


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